Fathom After the Superhuman Acquisition: Your Data and How to Export It

Last updated 18 September 2026. Every claim below links to its source. Nothing here is legal advice — if your contract names Fathom as a data processor, talk to whoever owns that contract.

What happened

On 14 September 2026, Superhuman announced it had acquired Fathom, the AI meeting notetaker. Superhuman is the company formerly known as Grammarly, which renamed its parent company to Superhuman in October 2025, folding Grammarly, Coda and Superhuman Mail under one brand. Fathom is its third acquisition since then, after Rows and GPTZero (TechCrunch).

Fathom's own announcement says "Nothing changes today for Fathom users. Same app, same login, same product experience." A Fathom connector is already live inside Superhuman Go, Superhuman's AI assistant, so Go can query your meetings.

"Nothing changes today" is accurate. The question worth asking is what the word today is doing in that sentence.

The one clause that matters: which terms govern which recordings

Fathom's privacy policy contains a clause most people never read, highlighted in an analysis published after the deal: your information "will be governed by the provisions of this Privacy Policy in effect at the time the applicable information was collected," while a revised policy "will be effective when it is posted."

In plain terms:

Calls you already recorded stay under the terms that were in place when they were recorded.
Calls you record after a revised policy is posted fall under whatever that revision says.

That is a normal, reasonable clause. It also means the acquisition does not change anything about your data on the day it closes — and that the protection you have is attached to when a call was recorded, not to the fact that you signed up for Fathom.

What the current terms say about AI training

As of Fathom's policy dated 16 August 2026, per the same analysis:

Fathom may use de-identified meeting content "to improve our Service by training, improving, and customizing our in-house artificial intelligence models."
Fathom does not authorize third-party model providers — the policy names "OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc" — to train on that content.
There is an opt-out.

The detail procurement teams tend to miss is who controls that opt-out:

Plan	Who controls AI-training opt-out
Free	Each user, in their own settings
Premium	Each user, in their own settings
Team and above	An admin can opt out all users

If your company has people recording customer calls on free or individual Fathom accounts — which is common, because the free tier is the main reason people chose Fathom — then whether your customers' conversations are used for training is decided one employee at a time, not by IT. That was true before the acquisition. The acquisition is simply a good moment to find out who is recording what.

Three questions to ask over the next two quarters

None of these have answers yet. They are the ones that decide whether you stay.

Does the free tier survive in its current form? Unlimited free recording is Fathom's defining feature. Free tiers are the usual casualty when a standalone product joins a paid suite. Superhuman has not said anything either way.
Does Fathom stay a standalone product, or become a Superhuman feature? Superhuman's stated plan is to bring meeting intelligence into its email, calendar, document and database apps. Good if you were buying Superhuman anyway. A problem if you were not.
When the policy is revised, what does it say? Given the at-collection clause above, this is the one to watch. Set a reminder to read Fathom's privacy policy each quarter, and diff it against the 16 August 2026 version.

What to do this week

You do not need to switch tools this week. You should do these four things regardless of whether you ever do:

Inventory who records. Find every person in your company using Fathom, and on which plan. Individual free accounts are the ones where the organisation has no control.
Set the training opt-out deliberately. On Team and above, an admin can do it for everyone. On Free and Premium, each person has to do it themselves — so if it matters, tell them.
Export your library. Recordings download as MP4 from each call; transcripts can be copied from each call; bulk export of transcripts is available through a Fathom API partner. Step-by-step instructions are further down this page.
Check your DPA. If your data processing agreement names Fathom specifically, an acquisition is a change your legal team will want to know about, whatever the product does.

A procurement checklist for any meeting recorder

The acquisition is a prompt, not a special case. Every tool that records your customers' voices deserves the same six questions, and most teams never ask them until something like this happens.

Who is the data processor, by legal name? Not the product name — the entity on the DPA. After an acquisition these can diverge.
Does the vendor train models on your content, and is it de-identified first? Get the answer in the policy, not in a sales call.
Who can turn training off — an admin for everyone, or each user separately? Per-user controls mean your organisation's position is the sum of individual choices.
Which policy version governs a given recording? At-collection clauses are common. Know which one you are under.
Can you export everything, in bulk, in a usable format, without a support ticket? Recordings and transcripts both. Try it before you need it.
What happens to your data if you leave? Deletion timelines after cancellation, and whether backups are included.

If a vendor cannot answer any of these in writing, that is the answer.

How to read a privacy policy change when one comes

When Fathom's policy is next revised, you will want to know what actually changed rather than rely on a summary email. The method takes fifteen minutes.

Save the current version now. Copy the full text of the privacy policy and terms into a dated file today. Without a baseline, you cannot diff.
When a new version is posted, save that too, and compare the two with any text-diff tool.
Read only the changed paragraphs, in this order: data use and AI training; sharing with affiliates (after an acquisition, the new parent is an affiliate); retention; and the governing-version clause.
Watch the word "affiliates." Post-acquisition revisions very often widen what can be shared within the corporate family. That is not sinister by default, but it is the clause that decides whether your meeting content can flow into the parent's other products.

What to tell your customers

If you record customer calls, your customers have an interest in where those recordings go. Recording-consent rules vary: some US states, including California, require all parties to consent to a recording, and GDPR requires a lawful basis for processing personal data. Your existing consent language almost certainly names recording, but rarely names the vendor.

You do not need to announce an acquisition you were not party to. You should make sure your recording notice is accurate about what happens to the recording — who processes it, and whether it may be used for model training. If your answer to either question changed on 14 September, your notice may need to change too.

How to export your Fathom library, step by step

Steps checked against Fathom's help center. If a button has moved, the help center is the source of truth.

What you can export, and how

What	One call	Many calls	Format
Video recording	Download from the call's menu	Recordings tab bulk download	MP4
Transcript	Copy Transcript button	Fathom API partner tools	Text (paste anywhere)
Summary and action items	Copy from the call view	Fathom API	Text

Step 1: Download a single recording

Open your Fathom dashboard.
Select the meeting you want.
Click the three-dot menu.
Choose Download Video.

Recordings download as MP4. According to Fathom's help article, MP3 download is listed as coming soon, so if you only need audio, convert the MP4 afterwards.

Step 2: Copy a single transcript

Transcripts cannot be downloaded as a file directly. Instead:

Open the recorded call.
Click Copy Transcript, directly above the transcript.
Paste it wherever you store it — a doc, a text file, a folder per account.

This is documented in Fathom's "Get a copy of your transcript" article. Name each file consistently — date, account, call type — before you have two hundred of them.

Step 3: Export in bulk

Copying transcripts one at a time does not work past a few dozen calls. Two routes:

Recordings: the Recordings tab supports bulk download of video and audio files across your library.
Transcripts: Fathom lists TranscriptExporter as an API partner that exports transcripts in bulk into a ZIP with consistent file names. If you are technical, Fathom's API can be scripted directly.

Before using any third-party exporter, check what access it requests and where it stores data in transit. You are exporting customer conversations; treat the tool that touches them the way you would treat the notetaker itself.

Step 4: Check what you have

An export nobody verified is an export that failed quietly. Before you consider this done:

Count the calls in Fathom and the files you have. They should match.
Open five files at random — the oldest, the newest, and three in between. Check they play or read correctly.
Check transcripts include speaker labels. A transcript without speakers is much less useful later.
Store the export somewhere with access controls, not a personal downloads folder. These are customer conversations.

Step 5: Decide what happens next

Once you have an export, you have options rather than obligations. Most teams do one of three things:

Stay on Fathom and keep a quarterly export habit. Perfectly reasonable, and the export is your insurance.
Move to another notetaker for personal meeting notes. Choose on privacy terms and export options, not features.
Move customer calls somewhere they get used. If the calls you recorded were customer calls, the transcripts are only valuable once product and customer success can find what customers said. That is the job BuildBetter does — it can import existing call recordings, so your history comes with you, and routes commitments, objections and requests from those calls to the teams that act on them.

How to organise the export so it stays useful

A folder of four hundred files called recording (37).mp4 is technically an export and practically useless. Spend ten minutes on structure before you download anything.

One folder per customer account, not per month. You will look for "everything Acme said," not "everything from March."
A consistent file name: YYYY-MM-DD_account_call-type, for example 2026-09-02_acme_qbr. Dates first so files sort chronologically.
Keep the transcript beside the recording, same base name, different extension. The transcript is what you will search; the recording is what you will cite.
Add a simple index file — a spreadsheet with date, account, call type, attendees, and one line on what the call was about. It turns an archive into something a new hire can use.

Moving your history into another tool

If you are moving, the question is not whether the new tool accepts uploads — nearly all of them accept MP4 and text. The questions are:

Does it keep the original call date? Some tools stamp imported calls with the upload date, which ruins any timeline you build later. Check with one call before importing a hundred.
Does it re-transcribe, or use your transcript? Re-transcription usually costs processing time and sometimes credits, but often improves speaker labels.
Does it link calls to accounts? A call that is not attached to a customer is hard to find again. Map your folder structure onto the new tool's account model before you import.
What happens to the calls once they are in? A second notetaker gives you a second archive. A tool that extracts what customers said and routes it to product and customer success gives you something to act on. Decide which you need before you pick.

Retention, deletion and the leftover copy

Exporting creates a copy. That copy is now yours to secure.

Decide whether you also want recordings removed from Fathom. Some teams export and keep Fathom as-is; others export and then delete. Check Fathom's help center for current deletion options and what they cover.
Apply your own retention policy to the export. If your company deletes call recordings after a set period, the exported copy is covered by that policy too. An export kept forever by accident is a liability you created.
Restrict access. Customer calls can contain pricing, contract terms, personal data and occasionally things said in confidence. The export deserves the same access controls as your CRM.

Make it a habit, not an event

The teams that come through acquisitions, shutdowns and repricing with no drama are not the ones that picked the right vendor. They are the ones that exported routinely, so no single vendor ever held the only copy.

A quarterly export takes under an hour once the structure above exists. Put it in the calendar for the first Monday of each quarter, alongside reviewing the vendor's privacy policy for changes. It is the cheapest insurance you will buy all year.

Common mistakes

Exporting video only. Video is large and hard to search. The transcript is usually the more useful artifact. Export both.
Waiting for a reason. The time to export is before you need to, not during a renewal.
Forgetting individual accounts. If people in your company record on personal free Fathom accounts, those libraries are theirs to export, not IT's. Ask them.
Not checking the result. See Step 4.

What this says about the notetaker category

Fathom is not the first meeting tool to be absorbed. It is part of a pattern: standalone tools that capture conversations get bought by platforms that want the data inside their own suite. Superhuman wants meeting context for its assistant. The logic is sound. It also means the recording tool you chose for one reason can be repriced, repackaged or re-termed for a different company's reason.

The defence is not picking the tool that will never be acquired — nobody knows that. It is making sure your customer conversations live somewhere you control, can export from, and can move. The recording is the least valuable part. What is valuable is what those conversations mean for your product, your customers and your revenue, and that should not be locked inside whichever notetaker happens to be recording today.

If you are evaluating alternatives

If you do decide to move, the choice depends on what you used Fathom for.

If you wanted free personal meeting notes, there are free notetakers and several of them are good. Pick on the privacy terms, not the feature list.
If your calls were customer calls that product and customer success needed to see, a personal notetaker was always the wrong shape. That is what BuildBetter is for: it records the call, and then routes what the customer said — commitments, objections, feature requests — to the teams who have to act on it, with the quote attached. You control retention and export, and BuildBetter does not train models on your customer data.

We maintain a longer, ranked comparison: Best Fathom Alternatives in 2026 (After the Superhuman Acquisition).

Frequently asked questions

Did Fathom change its name? No. Fathom is now part of Superhuman but still operates as Fathom — same app, same login. Superhuman itself is the renamed Grammarly.

Is my existing Fathom data safe? Calls already recorded stay governed by the privacy policy in effect when they were recorded. Nothing about existing recordings changed on the day of the acquisition.

Can Superhuman train AI on my Fathom calls? Under the current policy, Fathom may train its in-house models on de-identified meeting content and bars third-party model providers from doing so. There is an opt-out. Future policy revisions could change this for recordings made after they are posted.

Will Fathom stay free? Nobody has said. Fathom and Superhuman have committed to no change "today" and made no commitment about pricing beyond that.

How do I export everything from Fathom? Recordings download individually as MP4; transcripts copy individually; bulk transcript export is available through a Fathom API partner. See the step-by-step section above.

Can I download Fathom transcripts as a file? Not directly. Use Copy Transcript per call, or a Fathom API partner for bulk export.

What format are Fathom recordings? MP4. MP3 is listed as coming soon.

Can I export my whole Fathom library at once? Recordings can be bulk-downloaded from the Recordings tab. Transcripts in bulk need the Fathom API or a partner tool.

Will the Superhuman acquisition delete my recordings? Nothing announced suggests that. Fathom says the product continues unchanged. Exporting is a precaution, not a response to a known risk.

Can I import Fathom recordings into another tool? Most tools accept MP4 uploads and transcript text. BuildBetter imports existing call recordings, so historical calls can come with you.